Items relating to the Anglo-Norman Dictionaryhttp://hdl.handle.net/2160/25382015-03-31T20:48:07Z2015-03-31T20:48:07ZIntroduction to the Electronic Edition of the On-Line Anglo-Norman DictionaryTrotter, Davidhttp://hdl.handle.net/2160/25392009-07-03T01:00:22Z2006-01-01T00:00:00ZIntroduction to the Electronic Edition of the On-Line Anglo-Norman Dictionary
Trotter, David
The title of this second edition of the Dictionary preserves the old name purely in order to maintain continuity with the first edition, which adopted ‘Anglo-Norman’ as being the term in current use in academic circles at the time in the later nineteen-forties when the idea of a glossary of the medieval French of Britain was first mooted. In this regard, it is perhaps worth noting that the dictionary of Robert Kelham going back to 1779, too early to be affected by the Neo-Grammarians who influenced the thinking behind the original Anglo-Norman dictionary project, was entitled A Dictionary of the Norman and Old French Language, a form of words indicating an awareness even at that time of a broader geographical base than ‘Norman’ alone. Although the title of the new Dictionary remains the same as before, its contents are very different from those of the earlier work. In the first edition a significant change in both the depth and the spread of coverage is noticeable from fascicle 5 onwards (P-Z), in effect dividing the Dictionary into two dissimilar halves. This was made possible by the introduction of the important fichier gathered over many years by J.P. Collas, containing material from a wide range of both literary and non-literary texts, and also by the Dictionary of Law French compiled by Elsie Shanks but never published, the first serious attempt to record what is still the basic lexis of present-day English law. These additions transformed especially the non-literary side of the Dictionary, which up to that point was represented by only a small selection of texts outside the literary canon.
2006-01-01T00:00:00Z